The liberal media may thoroughly despise President Donald Trump, but they cannot deny his political clout. “Trump is the heart, soul and undisputed leader of the Republican Party,” Mike Allen wrote in Axios back in 2021.
After Trump’s 2024 election victory, Time magazine admitted the President-elect was “the world’s most powerful man,” selecting him (for the second time) as their Person of the Year. “He has realigned American politics, remaking the GOP and leaving Democrats reckoning with what went awry,” pronounced senior political correspondent Eric Cortellessa.
And on January 20, the Associated Press conceded: “Trump’s inauguration realized a political comeback without precedent in American history.”
Yet ten years ago tomorrow — June 16, 2015 — liberal journalists mocked and belittled Trump as having zero chance of success after the real estate mogul declared his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination in a lunchtime speech at Trump Tower.
Minutes after the announcement, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell asked her Democratic guest, former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell: “Do you have any doubt that this is anything more than a carnival show?”
On CBS This Morning the next day, co-host Norah O’Donnell relayed how “some Republicans say they’re worried Trump will turn the campaign into a circus,” as correspondent Nancy Cordes echoed how “party leaders worry Trump’s presence will turn the primary into a joke.”
Over on CNN, host Carol Costello displayed the sneering cover of the New York Daily News, with Trump wearing circus make-up: “Clown Runs for Prez.”
“Can we stipulate for the purposes of this conversation that Donald Trump will never be President of the United States?” Mike Barnicle asked on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
There were plenty of personal insults. CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin called Trump a “fool,” while NBC’s Chuck Todd blasted him as “a late-night joke” and “a political streaker.” The morning after Trump’s announcement, NBC’s Today show relegated the news to a 23-second brief, but made sure to include this insulting sentence: “America’s largest Latino civil rights organization called Trump ‘an exceedingly silly man.’”
On the June 16 edition of Bloomberg’s daily political show With All Due Respect, co-host John Heilemann announced: “I do not hate Donald Trump, but I do not take him seriously....Everything that was garish and ridiculous about him was fully on display....Will it get him anywhere close to becoming the nominee or the President of the United States? I think not.”
There was a lot more like that. Here’s a video montage of coverage, all from the day and a half immediately following Trump’s presidential announcement ten years ago (June 16-17, 2015):
The media’s insistence that Trump had no hope in the presidential election wasn’t merely a symptom of their smug nastiness. Journalists’ political predictions are grounded in their understanding of both the public’s mood at any given time, as well as the capability of campaigns to successfully tap into the issues that matter most to voters.
After eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency, the media in 2015 had blinded themselves to the discontents that fueled Trump’s rise — and continue to power his presidency today.
They weren’t trying to make fools of themselves by insisting Trump couldn’t win, yet that’s what happened, as the media exposed their woeful lack of understanding of Americans who live outside the elite media bubbles of New York City and Washington, D.C.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.